Q&A: Foul-Mouthed Blogger Ted Dziuba Tells Why Most Startups Fail

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Q&A: Foul-Mouthed Blogger Ted Dziuba Tells Why Most Startups Fail

* Photo: Julie Sloan * There is a certain gentleness to most Web 2.0 coverage. Even when startups sound flat-out dumb, we all root for the little guy.

Not Ted Dziuba. He's the blogger behind Uncov, and he brutally dismisses most companies with a single word: Fail.

Dziuba is the anti-Arrington. Of the startup Stixy, an online bulletin board, he writes: "It's virtually the same product as Wixi, with virtually the same name. Don't get me wrong, both products are steaming shit heaps; it's just harder to tell them apart now."

Of LingoZ, a user-written dictionary, he says: "These guys take themselves waaay too seriously to have a term like alligator fuckhouse in their lexicon. Now where's the fun in that?"

The thing is, as scathing as he is hilarious, Dziuba tends to be spot-on. Strip away the bombast, and Dziuba is a guilty pleasure that's actually worth reading.

Despite diagnosing Silicon Valley woes with the vinegar of a crotchety old man, Dziuba, it turns out, is only 23.

After getting his math degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2006, the Connecticut native spent a year at Google, He left to create his own startup, Persai (rhymes with Versailles) with college buddies and occasional Uncov bloggers Matt Kent and Kyle Shank.

Persai, Dziuba says, will launch its first product – a sort of intelligent newsreader – in beta before the end of the year.

With all the debate over Bubble 2.0, we figured whom better to ask than a critic whose tagline is "What. The. Fuck." Lord knows he isn't afraid to be honest. So we sat down with Dziuba at San Francisco's Caffe Centro, epicenter of Bubble 1.0, to talk about where Silicon Valley is still getting it wrong.

Wired News: In your opinion, where is Web 2.0 going wrong?

TD: What I'm seeing now with a lot of these Web 2.0 companies is that they're not based on technology, but on a dog-and-pony show. Under the surface, there's nothing noteworthy going on. The majority of them are just rolling the dice, and they know it. These are the people who will go to parties just to suck up to Arrington and say, "Hey come look at my startup. Please plug me." For these guys TechCrunch is going to make or break the company. If you look at a company's traffic graph on Alexa when it hits TechCrunch, there's a huge spike that day and then a month later it's down to almost nothing. In this world it's all about creating the buzz. It doesn't matter about revenues or profits. It's just about how many users you can get.

WN: How do you personally differentiate between what's worthy and what isn’t?

TD: You know you're a bullshit company when your core technology is Ajax. If the business is every widget under the sun conglomerated into this giant application, there's no real technology there. There's no noteworthy computer-science problem being solved. The Ajax stuff is pre-written. You just have to go to the libraries and put it all together.

When Gmail came out – and Gmail is a pretty kick-ass product – it was like, "Ha! Ajax for dynamic web apps! We can use it for everything!" So now you have companies like Zoho, for example. Their sole goal is to take every desktop app that ever existed and reimplement it in Ajax with no added features or functionality. It irritates me as an engineer that companies with no engineering merit, first off, are getting funded and, second off, are getting bought out.

WN: Why aren't more Silicon Valley bloggers trashing startups?

TD: I'm guessing they don't want to piss off advertisers. Or it would illegitimize them as a blogger to say something remotely critical of someone. The whole scene is like a little league game where everyone's a winner and everyone gets a trophy at the end. You've got people like Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble who are the coaches of the team and handing out the trophies, and then Uncov is like the creepy guy in the trench coat sitting in the stands.

People accuse us of saying negative stuff to get traffic. Honestly, I don't give a shit about the traffic. People could stop coming tomorrow. Great! I don't have to satisfy you vultures anymore. We don't have ads, although we're talking to a couple advertisers now because we have to cover our hosting costs. But it's by no means a profit center.

WN: Where do you stand on the whole "Bubble 2.0" issue? Is the bottom going to fall out?

__TD: __ It's going to happen slowly over time. It's not going to be like the first dot-com crash where the sky was falling within a month, only because it's all private-equity deals. There have been very few IPOs.

Google didn't do the world any favors when it overpaid so much for YouTube. That set off a surge in the expected value of a startup. A lot of people think that if you put $10,000 into enough of these, eventually one will pay off. But this whole thing is eventually going to cave in on itself. All these companies will keep getting bought up, but the acquirers are not going to see great returns.

WN: We've talked a lot about what you don't like. What types of companies do you like?

TD: Things that have actual technology behind them. Take Joost, for example. That is a really cool program, because the company spent a lot of time working on the quality of the picture. It looks really good. It also has exclusive content from big-name providers like Comedy Central that's actually worth watching. It's not a guy riding his bike into a tree on YouTube. Going out and getting licensing deals for content is hard work, and I'm pretty sure they're going to be well-rewarded for it.

WN: What did you do during the year you were at Google?

TD: I worked on internal apps. I got bored pretty quickly there and left to do something interesting.

WN: That's my cue. Tell me about Persai.

TD: The three of us are doing a company based around machine learning and artificial intelligence on an unreasonably large scale. We essentially want to automate the understanding of all the information in the world.

WN: (Pause.) What?

TD: We want to build machine programs that can learn things from information that's out there on the web. In the first application we'll come out with, you tell us things that you're interested in, and we'll continuously go out and find stuff on the internet that's related to that. There's a positive feedback loop where you tell us what you like and don't, so the machine gets progressively better in learning what you like.

WN: Is it going to be like, "I like unicorns; give me news about unicorns"? That sounds like a search engine.

TD: Search engine implies somebody's actively going out and looking for information. We're more passive than that. It's more like a newsreader. It's like you have some time to burn, so you go to Digg and see what the top headlines are. In that same style, except you take the community part completely out and leave all of it up to a machine.

WN: That's the opposite of what's trendy right now.

TD: Exactly. We're hoping that the tenet of "automation is key" still holds.

WN: Valleywag has commented that your ad-free blog is something of a bait and switch – build up attention without monetizing it and then introduce your for-profit startup.

TD: We're pretty good friends with the Valleywag people, so we bust each other's balls all the time. We all recognize that it's just the internet. At the end of the day you still go outside and nobody knows who you are. Valleywag is like Uncov: We both force people not to take themselves too seriously.